Friday, March 5, 2010

I AM the fail Tank

2/5/10

I'm finally getting around to having my Tauren Warrior Bullkathos get the Elders in Kalimdor, since it'll save me time next year when I'll be 80, and able to get all the achievements done. I might be able to do it all this year, but I think some of the Elders are in Heroics, and Bull is only 71 right now.

I dual-specced to Prot a while back, and while I organized my action bars for Battle/Defensive/Fury to be almost the same as when I'm Arms specced, I didn't actually....play like that. Bad tank, no biscuit!

Since I solo most of the time, I go with the higher DPS of Arms. However, flying around to get the Elders gets really boring after a bit, and since I've gotten more used to the LFD tool, I saw that Bull could get Emblems of Triumph, just like his big brother Bloodshrike!

I selected tanking, hit the "Find me a group!" button, and I swear, about 2 seconds passed since the time I clicked it to when I got the message that my dungeon was ready. Instant queue times indeed.....

I get into Nexus, switch to Protection, switch to Defensive stance, and realize that my Charge macro that I copied from a blog a long time ago, would be totally wrong for this. Shoot, I should have copied it before I erased it from my macros, but basically it would take you from any stance into Battle Stance, hit Bloodrage and Fury, and charge the monster, ending in a Hamstring. If you tapped it twice, it would switch you to Fury stance.

So, after LoS pulling, and throwing knives at monsters to get them to look at me, I came up with the simple macro I had used in the beginning of my warrior's adventures./cast Bloodrage/cast Berzerker rage/cast ChargeSo you're already getting some rage while charging the monster, and will continue to do so while getting hit, and hitting them back.

After about 2 minutes of very slow going, I revealed that this was my first tanking experience. After about 10 minutes in, I said they could boot me if they wanted, no harm no foul. Nope, they were all very friendly and helpful, encouraging me to use Thunderclap and Taunt (I remembered Mocking Blow on my own) more, and since I actually communicated and thanked them for their help, nobody insulted me or dropped out. We wiped on the first boss (Telestra), got the second(Anomalus) and 3rd boss (Ormorok) down with no problems, and I was getting into a more of a groove with my aggro and rotation.

We then wiped on Keristraza 2 times, and I died on the 3rd try, with the other guys stepping up and taking her down the last 20k health.

I have a lot more respect for tanks now. I never disrespect them anyway, and I'm always careful to start my dps after they start building aggro, with Misdirect going up as soon as I can. However, the sheer amount of things you have to concentrate on while tanking is kinda stressful.

I think Bull needs to level as Prot for a bit, until I can get my skills built into muscle memory, like it is for Arms spec.